Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(13,382)
- Faculty Publications (3,380)
- June 2025
- Article
Collusion in Brokered Markets
By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers and Richard Lowery
High commissions in the U.S. residential real estate agency market present a puzzle for economic theory because brokerage is not a concentrated industry. We model brokered markets as a game in which agents post prices for customers and then choose which other agents to... View Details
Keywords: Real Estate Agents; Real Estate; Realtors; Broker Networks; Brokerage; Brokerage Commissions; ＂Brokerage Industry; Brokered Markets; Brokering; Brokers; Industrial Organization; Repeated Game Framework; ＂Repeated Games＂; Collusion; Antitrust; Microeconomics; Market Design; Theory; Game Theory; Real Estate Industry
- Summer 2025
- Article
Dynamic Competition for Customer Memberships
By: Cristian Chica, Julian Jimenez-Cardenas and Jorge Tamayo
A competitive two-period membership (subscription) market is analyzed. Two symmetric firms charge a “membership” fee that allows consumers to buy products or services at a given unit price for both periods. Firms can choose between long- or short-term memberships. When... View Details
- Summer 2025
- Article
Time Well Spent: A New Way to Value Time Could Change Your Life
By: Leslie Perlow and Salvatore J Affinito
When individuals engage in fulfilling activities outside of work, they perform better on the job, but simply encouraging work-life balance doesn’t help with hour-by-hour time management. A new tool for measuring the subjective value of time for individuals as it varies... View Details
- June 2025
- Case
Vail Resorts: Responding to Activist Pressure (A)
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Edward A. Meyer
On January 27, 2025, the head of a relatively small hedge fund named Late Apex Partners sent a highly critical letter to the board of directors of Vail Resorts, the world’s largest ski resort operator. In his letter, and the 88-slide presentation that accompanied his... View Details
Keywords: Corporate Finance; Capital Budgeting; Corporate Governance; Competitive Advantage; Competitive Strategy; Leading Change; Valuation; Investment Activism; Climate Change; Management Succession; Financial Management; Risk Management; Business and Shareholder Relations; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; United States; Australia; Canada
- May 2025
- Case
stc Group: DARE to Transform
By: Sunil Gupta and Sadika El Hariri
Established as a government-owned entity in 1998, stc Group was the sole telecommunications operator in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Soon after it was privatized in 2003, regional players started entering the Saudi market. To deal with the competition and to... View Details
- May 2025
- Teaching Note
Boutiqaat: Influencing Retail in MENA
By: Juan Alcacer and Noor Al Qadhi
Boutiqaat, a Kuwait-based e-commerce platform, scaled an influencer-driven beauty retail model across MENA and now faces critical strategic choices about offline expansion and globalization. Founded in 2015, Boutiqaat combined social commerce, localized logistics, and... View Details
- May 2025
- Case
Boutiqaat: Influencing Retail in MENA
By: Juan Alcacer and Noor Al Qadhi
Boutiqaat, a Kuwait-based e-commerce platform, scaled an influencer-driven beauty retail model across MENA and now faces critical strategic choices about offline expansion and globalization. Founded in 2015, Boutiqaat combined social commerce, localized logistics, and... View Details
- May 2025
- Case
Wilburn Medical USA
By: David Ager, Lynda M. Applegate and James Barnett
In September 2024, Emily Wilburn Andrews, CEO of Wilburn Medical USA, is five years into her tenure leading the medical equipment supply company since taking over for her father, the company’s founder. She considers approaches to grow the company while maintaining the... View Details
- May 2025
- Case
Fidji Simo: Growing the Pie at Instacart
By: Hubert Joly, Leonard A. Schlesinger and James Barnett
In January 2025, Instacart CEO Fidji Simo considers strategies for continuing to grow Instacart from a grocery delivery platform to a holistic grocery technology company, including in-store grocery technology and expanding partnerships across the grocery sector. View Details
- May 2025
- Case
RTX's Lifetime Income Strategy: Shaping the Future of Retirement
By: Daniel Green, Luis M. Viceira and Sarah Mehta
Set in 2024, this case explores the Lifetime Income Strategy (LIS), a novel retirement product launched by aerospace and defense company RTX in 2012. Aiming to embed the security of a traditional pension within a 401(k) plan, the LIS allowed participants to secure a... View Details
- 2025
- Chapter
Employer-Based Short-Term Savings Accounts
By: Sarah Holmes Berk, John Beshears, Jay Garg, James J. Choi and David Laibson
We study the introduction of a choice architecture design intended to increase short-term savings among employees at five U.K. firms. Employees were offered the opportunity to opt into a payroll deduction program that auto-deposits funds from each paycheck into a... View Details
- 2024
- Case
EPCorp: Convincing the C-Suite
By: Jacob M. Cook
In EPCorp: Convincing the C-Suite, Shivani Bahl is attempting to sell EPCorp's CEO, Debbie Sullivan, on her ideas for not only a new website upgrade but also a more expansive vision on how data and Generative AI can be used to grow the company. Debbie is understandably... View Details
- May 2025
- Article
Imagining the Future: Memory, Simulation and Beliefs
By: Pedro Bordalo, Giovanni Burro, Katherine B. Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer
How do people form beliefs about novel risks, with which they have little or no experience? Motivated by survey data on beliefs about Covid we collected in 2020, we build a model based on the psychology of selective memory. When a person thinks about an event,... View Details
- 2025
- Chapter
Marjorie Yang Mun Tak 楊梅德：Entrepreneur and Innovator
By: William C. Kirby
BOOK ABSTRACT:
Chinese Encounters with America tells the stories of twelve women and men whose American experiences transformed their lives and influenced China’s trajectory, with a particular focus on the period after Beijing and Washington established... View Details
Chinese Encounters with America tells the stories of twelve women and men whose American experiences transformed their lives and influenced China’s trajectory, with a particular focus on the period after Beijing and Washington established... View Details
- May 2025
- Article
The Effects of Medical Debt Relief: Evidence from Two Randomized Experiments
By: Raymond Kluender, Neale Mahoney, Francis Wong and Wesley Yin
Two in five Americans have medical debt, nearly half of whom owe at least $2,500. Concerned by this burden, governments and private donors have undertaken large, high-profile efforts to relieve medical debt. We partnered with RIP Medical Debt (now Undue Medical Debt)... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
The Limits of Insurance Demand and the Growing Protection Gap
By: Parinitha Sastry, Tess Scharlemann, Ishita Sen and Ana-Maria Tenekedjieva
In a world with rising risk, how much are U.S. households willing to pay for homeowners insurance, and what does their demand imply for the future of insurance markets? We provide the first estimates of household willingness to pay for homeowners insurance and the... View Details
- May 2025
- Case
The Micro-Family Office: Aamir Rehman
By: Lauren Cohen and Sophia Pan
With a successful career and strong academic credentials, Aamir Rehman sought to design a life grounded in autonomy. For him, this meant serving on boards, continuing his professorship, and ensuring a secure and comfortable life for his family. While he didn’t possess... View Details
Keywords: Family Office; Family And Friends; Trends And Opportunities; Wealth Management; Family Business; Financial Strategy; Personal Finance; Investment Portfolio; Private Equity; Organizational Design; Family and Family Relationships; Happiness; Satisfaction; Balance and Stability; Human Capital; Compensation and Benefits; Economy; Trends; Business Model; Asset Management; Financial Management; New Jersey; United States
- April 2025
- Case
Thrivent: From Insurance Agents to Financial Advisors
By: Hubert Joly, Leonard A. Schlesinger and Tom Quinn
Thrivent, a midwestern financial services company with a centuries-long history rooted in Lutheranism, had reached $10 billion in revenue mostly by selling life insurance. In the 2020s, however, CEO Terry Rasmussen began a transformation process centered around the... View Details
Keywords: Change Management; Transformation; Talent and Talent Management; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Value and Value Chain; Forecasting and Prediction; Employee Relationship Management; Retention; Selection and Staffing; Job Design and Levels; Human Capital; Leading Change; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Insurance Industry; Financial Services Industry; United States; Minneapolis
- April 2025 (Revised May 2025)
- Case
Adobe: GenAI Opportunity or Threat?
By: Sunil Gupta, Rajiv Lal and Allison Ciechanover
In December 2022, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen faced a pivotal strategic decision due to the rapid rise of generative AI image models from OpenAI, Midjourney, and StabilityAI. Adobe, a leader in digital media and marketing software with a 40-year legacy of innovation and... View Details
- April 2025 (Revised May 2025)
- Background Note
Customer Acquisition and the Cash Flow Trap
By: E. Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller
Startups as well as existing firms recognize the need to invest in order to acquire customers for their new ventures. And as each customer is expected at some point to have generated sufficient gross margins to cover their CAC, management expects that, soon enough, the... View Details